NetApp recently launched its FAS8080 EX enterprise storage solution, a high-performance shared array that is optimized for use with pure flash.

The 8080 EX replaces NetApp’s 6290 array and is 75 percent faster for roughly the same price, according to a June 17 press release issued by NetApp, a FORTUNE 500 storage industry pioneer, market leader, and long-standing Sirius partner.

FAS8080 EX was engineered to take advantage of the higher core count of the new Intel Ivy Bridge processors it employs. The result is dramatically increased performance and decreased response times for the largest datasets. NetApp improved the threading of its Clustered Data ONTAP storage operating system and WAFL file system to take advantage of these new Intel cores.

The FAS8080 EX scales to up to 4 million IOPS (I/O operations per second) and has flexible network ports that can be equipped with 16-Gigabit Fibre Channel or 10-Gigabit Ethernet. It has an ability to be configured with up to 5 petabytes of all-flash storage capacity, or 500 TB of flash storage used as a cache with up to 70 petabytes of hard disk capacity in a hybrid solution, according to NetApp. It can scale out into a NAS (network-attached storage) cluster of as many as 24 nodes, or a SAN (storage-area network) cluster of as many as eight nodes. Enterprises can mix hybrid and all-flash nodes, and move workloads around the cluster depending on the current performance requirements of each one.

Along with the FAS8080 EX, NetApp also introduced the FAS2500, thereby completing a refresh of its entire FAS line of storage solutions. The FAS2500 features expanded flash support to accelerate workloads by over 40 percent and increase capacity by nearly 50 percent compared to previous models.